‘How are you getting on with Catherine?’ asked Edward hastily.
‘How did you know I was thinking about Catherine?’
‘Well, you were, weren’t you? Honestly, Viccy, I do want you to become friends with Catherine.’
‘Don’t call me Viccy.’
‘All right, Charing Cross. I want you to become friends with Catherine.’
‘How fatuous men are! Always wanting their girl friends to like each other.’
Edward sat up energetically. He had been reclining with his hands behind his head.
‘You’ve got it all wrong, Charing Cross. Anyway, your references to harems are simply silly –’
‘No, they’re not. The way all those girls glower intensely at you and yearn at you! It makes me mad.’
‘Splendid,’ said Edward. ‘I love you to be mad. But to return to Catherine. The reason I want you to be friends with Catherine is that I’m fairly sure she’s the best way of approach to all the things we want to find out. She knows something.’
‘You really think so?’
‘Remember what I heard her say about Anna Scheele?’
‘I’d forgotten that.’
‘How have you been getting on with Karl Marx? Any results?’
‘Nobody’s made a bee-line at me and invited me into the fold. In fact, Catherine told me yesterday the party wouldn’t accept me, because I’m not sufficiently politically educated. And to have to read all that dreary stuff – honestly, Edward, I haven’t the brains for it.’
‘You are not politically aware, are you?’ Edward laughed. ‘Poor Charing Cross. Well, well, Catherine may be frantic with brains and intensity and political awareness, my fancy is still a little Cockney typist who can’t spell any words of three syllables.’
Victoria frowned suddenly. Edward’s words brought back to her mind the curious interview she had had with Dr Rathbone. She told Edward about it. He seemed much more upset than she would have expected him to be.
‘This is serious, Victoria, really serious. Try and tell me exactly what he said.’
Victoria tried her best to recall the exact words Rathbone had used.
‘But I don’t see,’ she said, ‘why it upsets you so.’
‘Eh?’ Edward seemed abstracted. ‘You don’t see – But my dear girl, don’t you realize that this shows that they’ve got wise to you. They’re warning you off. I don’t like it Victoria – I don’t like it at all.’
He paused and then said gravely:
‘Communists, you know, are very ruthless. It’s part of their creed to stick at nothing. I don’t want you knocked on the head and thrown into the Tigris, darling.’
How odd, thought Victoria, to be sitting amidst the ruins of Babylon debating whether or not she was likely in the near future to be knocked on the head and thrown into the Tigris. Half closing her eyes she thought dreamily, ‘I shall wake up soon and find I’m in London dreaming a wonderful melodramatic dream about dangerous Babylon. Perhaps,’ she thought, closing her eyes altogether, ‘I am in London…and the alarm clock will go off very soon, and I shall get up and go to Mr Greenholtz’s office – and there won’t be any Edward…’
And at that last thought she opened her eyes again hastily to make sure that Edward was indeed really there (and what was it I was going to ask him at Basrah and they interrupted us and I forgot?) and it was not a dream. The sun was glaring down in a dazzling and most un-London-like way, and the ruins of Babylon were pale and shimmering with a background of dark palms and sitting up with his back a little towards her was Edward. How extraordinarily nicely his hair grew down with a little twirl into his neck – and what a nice neck – bronzed red brown from the sun – with no blemishes on it – so many men had necks with cysts or pimples where their collars had rubbed – a neck like Sir Rupert’s for instance, with a boil just starting.
Suddenly with a stifled exclamation Victoria sat bolt upright and her daydreams were a thing of the past. She was wildly excited.
Edward turned an inquiring head.
‘What’s the matter, Charing Cross?’
‘I’ve just remembered,’ said Victoria, ‘about Sir Rupert Crofton Lee.’
As Edward still turned a blank inquiring look upon her Victoria proceeded to elucidate her meaning which truth to tell, she did not do very clearly.
‘It was a boil,’ she said, ‘on his neck.’
‘A boil on his neck?’ Edward was puzzled.
‘Yes, in the aeroplane. He sat in front of me, you know, and that hood thing he wore fell back and I saw it – the boil.’
‘Why shouldn’t he have a boil? Painful, but lots of people get them.’
‘Yes, yes, of course they do. But the point is that that morning on the balcony he
‘Hadn’t what?’
‘Hadn’t got a boil. Oh, Edward, do try and take it in. In the aeroplane he had a boil and on the balcony at the Tio he hadn’t got a boil. His neck was quite smooth and unscarred – like yours now.’
‘Well, I suppose it had gone away.’
‘Oh no, Edward, it couldn’t have. It was only a day later, and it was just coming up. It couldn’t have gone away – not completely without a trace. So you see what it means – yes, it must mean – the man at the Tio wasn’t Sir Rupert at all.’
She nodded her head with vehemence. Edward stared at her.
‘You’re crazy, Victoria. It must have been Sir Rupert. You didn’t see any other difference in him.’
‘But don’t you see, Edward, I’d never really looked at him properly – only at his – well, you might call it general effect. The hat – and the cape – and the swashbuckling attitude. He’d be a very easy man to impersonate.’
‘But they’d have known at the Embassy –’
‘He didn’t stay at the Embassy, did he? He came to the Tio. It was one of the minor secretaries or people who met him. The Ambassador’s in England. Besides, he’s travelled and been away from England so much.’
‘But why –’
‘Because of Carmichael, of course. Carmichael was coming to Baghdad to meet him – to tell him what he’d found out. Only they’d never met before. So Carmichael wouldn’t know he wasn’t the right man – and he wouldn’t be on his guard. Of course – it was Rupert Crofton Lee (the false one) who stabbed Carmichael! Oh, Edward, it all fits in.’
‘I don’t believe a word of it. It’s crazy. Don’t forget Sir Rupert was killed afterwards in Cairo.’
‘That’s where it all happened. I know now. Oh Edward, how awful. I saw it happen.’
‘You saw it happen – Victoria, are you quite mad?’
‘No, I’m not in the least mad. Just listen, Edward. There was a knock on my door – in the hotel in Heliopolis – at least I thought it was on my door and I looked out, but it wasn’t – it was one door down, Sir Rupert Crofton Lee’s. It was one of the stewardesses or air hostesses or whatever they call them. She asked him if he would mind coming to BOAC office – just along the corridor. I came out of my room just afterwards. I passed a door which had a notice with BOAC on it, and the door opened and he came out. I thought then that he had had some news that made him walk quite differently. Do you see, Edward? It was a trap, the substitute was waiting, all ready, and as soon as he came in, they just conked him on the head and the other one came out and took up the part. I think they probably kept him somewhere in Cairo, perhaps in the hotel as an invalid, kept him drugged and then killed him just at the right moment when the wrong one had come back to Cairo.’
‘It’s a magnificent story,’ said Edward. ‘But you know, Victoria, quite frankly you are making the whole thing up. There’s no corroboration of it.’
‘There’s the boil –’
‘Oh, damn the boil!’
‘And there are one or two other things.’
‘What?’
‘The BOAC notice on the door. It wasn’t there later. I remembered being puzzled when I found the BOAC office was on the other side of the entrance hall. That’s one thing. And there’s another. That air stewardess, the
